The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  The rotator cuff injuries, and an earlier painful fall while hauling in the Christmas tree, had left him hobbled, feeling his age, thinking about the future. He couldn’t wrestle, not even on the Takedown Machine. Piece by piece, he’d been stripped of the things that had kept his demons in check since seventh grade, in the gray cinder-block dungeon at West High School. First he lost his sister and his perfect record. Then he lost his wrestling career, then his coaching career, then he lost wrestling itself, seeing former opponents fall victim to Title IX and shrinking budgets. He lost his relevance. His girls grew up. He endured eight knee operations and four hip replacements in exchange for whatever relief wrestling brought. Then doctors told him he couldn’t wrestle people any longer, and the Christmas tree and the chain saw nearly took away the Takedown Machine, and that is just about that. Some essential part of Gable is gone forever. He’ll likely never wrestle again, stripped of the most important part of himself, his ability to keep his pain buried inside.

  Now the IOC wants to take away the Olympics.

  Gable walks four or five blocks during this conversation, winding above the sidewalks and streets of Des Moines on the skywalk. A guard checks his ticket and waves him into the suite level. Making the turn down the hall to join his family, he thinks about his useless gear gathering dust in the Iowa wrestling room.

  “Maybe it’s time to turn my locker in,” he says. “It might be.”

  His words carry many different emotions: surprise, relief, resignation, and, just maybe, acceptance.

  “They might need it,” he says. “I don’t want to hold back any progress.”

  * * *

  —

  A few hours before Iowa’s final round of the tournament, Gable and two friends find a sauna in a private gym, accessible by an unmarked door and a metal staircase. The temperature rises toward 200. Gable scoops his hand into the water bucket to splash his face. He’s been vulnerable, raw after the Olympics fight and the Hawkeyes’ collapse. Maybe that’s why it hits him now. The memory of his sister comes to him, vividly. He is being pulled backward, toward her death and his complicity in it.

  He brings it up on his own, and the story trickles out. Every now and again, he splashes water on his face. His friends look at the floor in silence. The It was a Sunday.

  They’d driven the block from a rented fishing cabin to a nearby pay phone. He sat in the back seat. Nobody answered at the house in Waterloo. Dan remembers his parents feeling antsy. They got a neighbor to go check. He said the door was locked but the television or radio was playing. Mack Gable told the guy to get in the house and call back.

  They waited.

  Dan remembers the noise the phone made, the metallic, guttural rattle.

  “Rrrrrrring,” he says now. “Rrrrrring.”

  It’s hard to breathe in the sauna.

  Mack answered and listened as the neighbor described Diane’s half-naked body dead on the living room carpet, in the same room where Dan once sat in the window. Katie kept bumping her husband, asking over and over what he was hearing. She studied his face for clues. Mack dropped the phone. It swung back and forth, slowly, back and forth. Back and forth.

  Dan sees the phone again. He pictures it now: a swaying receiver connected by a creaking metal cord to a box.

  “She’s been hurt,” Mack said.

  “How bad?” Katie asked.

  “She’s not alive,” Mack said.

  Dan hears the words again. She’s not alive. The sweat rolls down his arms.

  Katie tore off toward the cabin, with Dan sprinting after her, Mack chasing in the car. When Dan reached the cabin, he found his mother pounding her head on the floor, over and over again.

  “Blood on the floor of the four-dollar-a-night cabin” is what he says in the sauna, and his friends don’t say a word.

  “It’s hot,” Gable says suddenly. “I’m gonna step outside.”

  Mike Duroe and Doughty watch him compose himself. Gable returns, ready to continue. His family had started the endless drive across small Iowa highways when Dan said he might know something. Mack swerved off the road, pulling his son from the car. Dan explained that a neighborhood boy named Tom Kyle had been saying aggressive, sexual things about Diane, but Dan thought it was just normal guy talk. He never said anything to anyone. He didn’t know. He was just a boy. Mack slapped Dan, hard, across the face, then hugged him. Pain and relief, even then.

  “Helped him,” Dan says now. “Helped me.”

  They drove home, and Dan moved into her room, winning 182 straight matches before losing. Some part of Gable never stopped blaming himself for her death.

  His story isn’t finished.

  Tom Kyle went to prison for life. Then two years ago, on the ride home from a fishing trip, Dan’s cell phone rang. It was the prison. Kyle, they explained, was dead. Dan looked out his window as he listened and shuddered. He was passing the parking lot where they found out about Diane, where his dad dropped a pay phone that swung slowly on its cord. Kyle’s death brought back the sorrow and grief, the anger and guilt, and Gable walked around his 45 acres when he got home, yelling and screaming at the tall pines. He needed to purge these feelings.

  “I didn’t get it all,” he tells his friends, standing outside of the sauna, leaning in, “but I got a lot. Like the Owings loss.”

  He closes the door and sinks into a chair. Like the Owings loss. Something is very close to the surface, and he tries to force it back down. The pain about his sister is combining with all the other pain he’s felt in his life, with Larry Owings, with the Olympics, even with McDonough. He struggles with it. This is the price of trying to bury a lifetime of hurt. At some point, each loss stopped being a separate thing, blurring into the ones that came before, until there isn’t even such a thing as individual losses, just loss. Every new pain feels like all his pain. Gable is hunched over. His friends wait for him to move. He rises to his feet and raps the sauna door goodbye.

  Four hours later, the emotions that started in the sauna force their way out, released by his joy over Derek St. John’s national title. Mackie rushes to find Kathy, who comforts him. “I had to get it out of me,” he says, still sniffling, wiping away his tears. “A lot of pain. I had to have a win, just to get it out of me.”

  * * *

  —

  They’re back in Iowa City. It took all morning to pack the hotel room and load grandkids into the proper vehicles. There’d been drama with Annie, who didn’t want to stop and eat together on the way back. It turned into a big fight, tempers flaring, everyone sensitive and exhausted. It’s an enormous pain for moms with young children to relocate to a different city every March for a wrestling tournament.

  Dan walks through a foot of snow toward the barn, cranking the ATV, the powder blowing over the tires as he accelerates through a clearing in the woods. He pulls up to a small barn with a low ceiling and steps inside to gather wood. The logs are still wet, and the air smells like oak and elm. He’s thinking about the recent drama, not sure if he’ll be able to get everyone to do it again next year.

  “I don’t know how long we’ll keep up this wrestling stuff,” he says.

  He steers the vehicle onto a hill where he used to run, pressing the pedal to the floor, kicking up a wake of snow. When he comes to a trail blocked by a fallen tree, he turns around, making a note to come back later with a chain saw. This land is a lot of work, and he’s getting older. He’s got to be careful. Another fall might be more than he can handle. They’re thinking about downsizing. Building a small house and selling the big one to Jenni. Next year, for the first time in their lives, Dan and Kathy are spending January and March in Florida, returning to Iowa in February for wrestling events. They’ve rented a place. The sun will be a relief, easing Dan’s aching joints. Here, surrounded by his forest, he has found the strength to finally surrender, which is its own kind of victory. To his left, five
deer move through the trees. Snow piles on the branches, two inches at least.

  Up ahead in the driveway, he sees his daughter’s car running, coughing exhaust smoke. Mackie and Justin are about to leave, making the drive to Dubuque, where she teaches kindergarten and he coaches soccer. The reverse lights are on by the time Gable reaches the car. He leans in and gently kisses her on the forehead. Mackie’s car disappears around the bend, leaving behind a red glow and then not even that. Everything is still. The house is empty. He’ll know the fate of Olympic wrestling soon enough. His fighting days are nearly finished. Gable goes back inside. All he can do is wait for headlights to shine through the windows, letting him know one of his girls has come back home.

  AUGUST 2013

  Beyond the Breach

  A summer in search of saints, sinners, and lost souls in the New Orleans that Katrina left behind.

  I. THE 10-YEAR FLOOD

  With the air conditioner off for filming, the only noise in Steve Gleason’s home is the breathing machine that keeps him alive. That’s as good a place as any to start a Katrina story, with the wires and plugs and tubes strapped to the back of his wheelchair, a life-support apparatus doing the heavy lifting for one of the most fervently alive people the city has ever known. The city has known its share. New Orleans treasures hyperlocal folk heroes: Soulja Slim, the king of the street rappers before the storm, shot at least three times in the face and once in the chest, dead in his black Reeboks; Trombone Shorty, who closed out this year’s Jazz Fest instead of Elton John or Lenny Kravitz; Chris Rose, the Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper columnist who wrote the best stories about the storm until his life unraveled and he found himself waiting tables. Gleason is that kind of hero. In the team’s first night back in the Superdome after the storm, he stretched out his arms and blocked a punt in the opening series of a Monday Night Football game. There is a nine-foot statue of him outside the Dome now, but the actual Steve Gleason is paralyzed, four years into an ALS diagnosis. Most people don’t make it past five.

  “OK, I’m rolling,” the camerawoman says.

  Gleason uses his eyes and an interactive tablet to highlight the first sentence of the text, one of a series of love letters to the city that a local nonprofit asked influential citizens to write on the 10th anniversary of the storm. Since he can no longer use the muscles in his mouth, he speaks through a computerized voice, his humanity blunted by a droning, syllable-centric machine. Nothing works but his eyes.

  “Dear New Orleans,” he begins, and when he finishes reading the letter, one of his assistants, Lauren, wipes Gleason’s eyes and nose with a towel.

  “I cry every time I read it,” he says.

  Lauren stays strong in front of Steve, but when she gets around the corner into the kitchen, she falls apart, slipping into a bedroom to be alone. It’s an ugly thing to watch someone fight a battle he cannot win. Living, then, is in the fighting. “No White Flags,” it reads on the Team Gleason foundation’s T-shirts and wristbands.

  Dear New Orleans.

  No white flags.

  * * *

  —

  Rebirth has been the standing field order of the past 10 years in New Orleans, a powerful force shaping the city in ways big and small. Everything is governed by this spirit of renewal, and everything is viewed through its lens, from the fervent love of brass bands to the New Orleans Saints, the standard-bearers of a city struggling back to its feet. But within this hopeful word an idea hides in plain sight: For something to be reborn, it must have first died.

  One afternoon in August, the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, meets me at an old seafood market reimagined after the storm as a high-end culinary destination. He tries to explain how 10 years passes like a day.

  “For those of us who were here, it was a deeply emotional, deeply personal, painful experience,” he says. “I mean, it was hard. But we were in a near-death environment, so we didn’t really have time to process it. We literally had to get out of harm’s way so that we could stay alive. Then we immediately had to start rebuilding. And I’m not sure that a lot of us have had a chance to process it.”

  “Have you grieved?”

  The question catches him off guard, and for just a moment he drops his smooth politician’s front, closing his eyes, looking away.

  “I really don’t know the answer to that question,” he says. “Probably not fully. You know, I find myself really getting choked up.”

  The hurricane lives in a complicated place. Everyone’s experience is both communal and personal, obvious and hidden. The memory of the death is everywhere, buried in shallow and temporary graves.

  * * *

  —

  Each summer in New Orleans has a soundtrack.

  In the blistering, rainy summer of 2015, that soundtrack is provided by Boosie BadAzz, formerly Lil Boosie, formerly prisoner No. 560699, home from a three-and-a-half-year stay in the plantation fields of Angola for a marijuana charge. New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate in Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate per capita in America, which has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world. Eighty-five percent of the inmates at Angola never get out. They take a one-way bus ride to an eastward bend in the river near the Louisiana-Mississippi line. Boosie is one of the lucky ones—he made the trip back south—and now this summer his anthems of Louisiana street life throb out the windows of speeding cars, the floating hint of a hook giving away the track, drowning in cardboard subwoofer fuzz, trunks, and rearview mirrors.

  You hear the songs over and over again, like now in Shack Brown’s pickup truck, headed out of town on Interstate 10. Brown is a youth football coach, driving to Jackson, Mississippi, to do a stand-up comedy gig, one of the many jobs that allow him to spend most of his time working with kids. He talks quietly with music in the background, until a remix of Boosie’s “Show da World” comes on. Brown turns up the stereo and sings. God keep blessing me ’cause I’m a good father . . . diabetes steady working on my kidneys, man . . . hoping kids learn from my mistakes and take a different route. Brown got his nickname because he grew before the other boys, then quit growing just after his friends started calling him Shack. He’s about 6-foot-1—and was as a seventh-grader. He’s got a barrel chest and the gut of a man who never let his changing metabolism alter his love for fried food. His New Orleans East neighborhood smells like bread and coffee, from nearby factories. In the summer, the streets smell like crawfish.

  Over and over, he listens to “Show da World,” cuing it up when he needs a dose of self-confidence: “Lemme hit that Boosie,” he’ll say, and one line always makes him rise out of his seat and rap hard with the track, hitting an imaginary drum on each word.

  “I’M A PROJECT NIGGA!” he shouts into the steering wheel.

  Shack, who gets his name, if not its spelling, from the LSU basketball star, grew up in the Iberville projects. It is his armor and his weapon. Everything in the city rises on the ashes of something else, whether Shack Brown himself or the neighborhood where he was born. Before it was the Iberville, the streets between the French Quarter and what’s now I-10 were the most famous red-light district in the country, Storyville, which the navy insisted be closed in 1917. (At some point, big iron wrecking balls are cheaper than years of penicillin.) Only one or two of the buildings that were whorehouses and saloons still stand; an old jazz club is now Iberville’s corner store, the New Image Supermarket. The older men drink beer on the sidewalk a block away at Basin Super Market Seafood and Grill. Sometimes Shack visits old friends, but mostly he stays far away from the Iberville, or what’s left of it.

  People in the projects respect Shack Brown because he survived the early ’90s, when Iberville was at its worst. The cops in the nearby French Quarter ride horses, and Shack can still hear the pounding of hooves on concrete, like something from a dystopian Wild West movie. They followed purse snatchers back into the projects—cops i
n shiny helmets brandishing sticks and guns, flying through the Iberville courtyards, the horses breathing heavy in the thick, wet air.

  “I’ve watched older dudes steal Greyhound buses,” he says, laughing.

  The kids trust Brown because he was them. He sold drugs and tasted that life—$10,000 a week, he claims—which he realized would lead either to Angola or to a cemetery at the end of Canal Street. Mostly, he couldn’t deal with the damage he saw himself causing, making a bad place worse instead of trying to make it better. He was a lousy drug dealer, letting people slide on credit, not cracking down on the addicts who couldn’t pay. When he searched his past for men who’d done something positive, the only ones he remembered were coaches. They were respected, the lone alternative to the dealers. In New Orleans, especially, they are the front line in a fight to save just a few of the brightest young men in every generation. Shack started coaching, wanting to help kids but also hoping to feel good about his life, to wash clean the hurt he’d caused. So in the mid-1990s, he devoted himself full time to helping kids, trading the drug cash for $234 a month, working a straight job for Blair Boutte, another former Iberville resident, who today runs the most successful bail bonds company in town. Now 38, Brown works as many jobs as he can find, all while funding his youth teams.

  He lives on the margins; until the price of oysters went up, he set up his cooker rig and chargrilled them at parades all over town. Now a croker sack costs $45 and he can’t sell them for more than $60, which he says doesn’t pay his expenses. During big events, like the Super Bowl, he drives a limo. He volunteers time and money for kids, spending his own cash on ice and water and mouthpieces. On game day, he cooks a meal for his players, who often arrive hungry. A po’boy here, a plate lunch there, feeding 9-year-olds, it adds up.